Planning a positive gardening year! Iona Chisholm
Once the plants could be left to gently wake up in a fairly tidy garden, I’ve enjoyed time to read and have been on a gardening learning journey. It has refreshed my plans and enthusiasm to improve the garden and allotment further, and I feel fulfilled from acquiring a knowledge of garden history. I’ve also reflected on the past year, for which this quote from Jenny Uglow seems fitting: “We might think we’re nurturing our garden, but really the garden is nurturing us”. With snowdrops breaking the soil and signs of surviving perennials reaching out, it feels such positive time when another year lies ahead like a blank canvas and, like the plants, we’re raring to go.
aThe garden has a satisfying structure, texture and colour from its evergreens and winter foliage. This is due to the glossy, vivid lime-green leaves of the Camellia japonica and griselinia set against the copper beech hedge, the texture of the variegated leylandii and dwarf conifers such as Juniperus squamata ’Blue Star’, the uplifting euonymus ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’ and a new addition, euphorbia ‘Silver Swan’. I also love the feathery canopy from next door’s cedar tree. Our Betula utilis jacquemontii (Himalayan white birch) and the Acer griseum in a nearby park both stand out for me and I’m hoping to get a paper bark maple for my birthday!
Cyclamen are cheerful, shining white and pink in their rows beneath the hedges. Although small, the new bush honeysuckle, diervilla ’Diva’, that I put in last year, has striking